Tom's Views

While people can learn to take   romantic rejection   less to heart and maintain their composure when it happens, it’s also important to learn NOT to underestimate romantic rejection’s potential for causing much long-term harm to a person’s psyche. Even to the most self-assured person, romantic rejection has clear costs as follows:

• It harms by depletes long-term confidence,
• Repeated romantic rejection can promote neurosis, depression, and psychosis,
• It can trigger depression and thus, can cause all the symptoms associated with depression, which can be quite harmful and difficult if not impossible to recover from.
• Romantic rejection interferes with ability to concentrate.
• It weakens motivation – even in unrelated areas of life such as work.
• It might strengthen food, drug, and alcohol addictions,
• Too much romantic rejection creates a false sense of futility regarding the achievability of one’s Big Dream.  Get shot down too often, and you may decide to give up pursuing your big dream.
• Love rejection encourages withdrawal from social circles – isolation.
• It can lower immune system function and thus indirectly harm the body by allowing opportunistic illnesses to set in.
• Rejection in love can increase at-rest stress levels, and most of us know these days just how gravely harmful chronic stress can be.
• Frequent romantic rejection may promote obsessive behaviors such as trying more than once and too often to date a girl who’s already rejected us.

In short, too much romantic rejection, without sufficient time between each occurrence for healing, can harm our physical and mental well-being over the long term. So, though stumbling upon love rejection while pursuing true love cannot be avoided, we   should not   subject ourselves to  needless rejection   as it injures us.  We ought to avoid romantic rejection’s negative effects when practical.

Some folks equate romantic rejection with   progress  when they get it,  in the sense that the more lovers who turn them down, the closer they are to finding one who will at last accept them. “Let’s say you have a pool of 10,000 women,” a therapist once said. “Your goal is to quickly rule out as many of those as you can, so that you’ll reach the ones who like you faster.” The underlying assumption here is that at least   someone   in that pool of 10,000 will in fact find us attractive. In this light, romantic rejection appears as a holly grail, to be sought out rather than avoided. But as mentioned, it also stifles motivation to keep trying, which may in the end prove more debilitating than avoiding it in the first place.  Too much rejection creates more fear of it, and if we become too afraid, we may not be able to try at all to overcome rejection.

Plus, when striving for solely a high rejection count becomes the sole object, we can end up recklessly approaching too many of the   wrong   lovers, which can itself be socially harmful to us.  We may suspect them to be wrong, but to get the rejection count up, we approach them anyway, thinking that they’d eventually warm up or that somehow, we’d get used to romantic rejection and no longer fear it. But the best antidote to the fear of romantic rejection is to find sustained acceptance, not more rejection.  Getting more romantic rejection should not be the object.  The healthier object should be to get acceptance.

Many fellows ignore body language in their quests for more rejections.  Thus, they disregard what the lady wants (or does not want). No matter that she turns away as they walk closer. These arrogant chumps try relentlessly to start conversations anyhow. Sometimes, the woman relents and talks to them.  Indeed, I’d seen so many men do this with eventual success that it seemed a prudent behavior, even though invariably it was received badly on the first attempt. One man described a woman’s protective shell that he said, must be penetrated like cracking a nut. It really is a war, these pesky men say, because ladies intentionally play hard to get in order to test the man’s resolve. (Obviously, these men have little faith in her sincerity). Give up when she seems bored they caution, and you lose the battle because she’ll deem you of faint heart, and as such, undeserving of her trust. Take no as her final answer, and you’ll never enjoy a lovely beauty on your arm. Nonsense!  They ignore the wearing-down effect repeated romantic rejection generates.

As a means to acceptance, we can easily abuse romantic rejection by seeking it indiscriminately, just as we might overindulge in exercise on the way to a healthy, fit body. The result is our endurance of excessive negative effect.  Work the body too hard without enough rest in between each workout, and you’ll wear out your joints, promote arthritis, and reduce the long-term benefits of training. That is, should you become arthritic, you’d not be able to continue to work out as vigorously, and some of the routines you simply would not be able to do, period. Clearly, the future effects of overdoing exercise in the present would limit the benefits you could gain in later years. And over the course of a lifetime, exercise improperly managed as a youth can actually cause reduced average fitness, just as the chronic dieter can wind up heavier than those who never dieted at all.

Likewise, subject yourself to too many rapid-fire love rejections without allowing sufficient time for reflection and mental repair, and you’ll probably experience some of the symptoms I’ve listed above. Too much romantic rejection can exacerbate the very condition (loneliness) that you’re trying to eliminate. So at times, it’s wise to avoid love rejection rather than repeatedly confronting it. If you seek rejection rather than acceptance, pain will be your reward; not the love that you want.  Romantic rejection indeed causes long-term harm.  So please do not subject yourself to if if you do not have to.  Good luck.

Tom Hesley

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In this piece, I continue the arguments (started here) that it’s unlikely that   mindfulness meditation therapy   can relieve a strong love desire as surely as   actually finding true love. So I resume efforts in this segment to pick apart an article [Mentat] provided, that attempts to show that mindfulness meditation can cure a myriad of ills indeed.  But my simple point is that medication probably cannot vanquish a person’s   true love desire   in any practical ways.

Dear [Mentat],

Again, let’s assume for this discussion that the   mood set point   discussed   here   indeed exists.  Further assume that the   mood set point   is not changed over the long term by the usual   life-altering events   that typically occur in a person’s life. Given these, the article you sent me then discusses how the mood set point can be influenced positively by mindfulness meditation. Well, perhaps it can. But several questions arise:

1. Would for example, the Dali Lama’s seemingly perpetual good moods survive a transplant from his culture to a more western one? That is, if he came to live in the United States, I wonder how long he’d continue to benefit from his advanced meditative skills, or if the benefit would remain as clearly pronounced as it is while he lives in his native lands. Indeed, many easterners who permanently relocate here soon adopt most of the stress-related health problems that have come to characterize our culture [here in America]. The Dali Lama’s native culture may be more determinative of his heightened sense of well-being than his meditative skills.  So meditation itself may be only partially responsible for his tranquil disposition.
2. How applicable are these techniques to counteracting the loneliness resulting from thwarted   love needs   gratification? Specifically, how well would they work against love lust? The [article] does not address this. While the techniques appear to work well to reduce stress in the chronically stressed-out western worker, the article attributes no direct applicability of this technique specifically to the particular emotional and physical stresses of doing without   romantic   relationships. While it does say that the resulting mood elevation might help make relationships in general better,   it does not say which kinds of relationships. I’m skeptical of meditation’s long-term positive effects at eliminating a basic need (deficiency need) – particularly one at level three or lower in Maslow’s needs hierarchy.
3. How widely applicable is this, particularly in so-called right-brained people? This article relies much on the subjective interpretations of MRI brain scan data. Deciphering these is even more of an art than reading X-Ray pictures (I found out just how “guessy” reading X-rays can be when I injured my wrist six year ago. But more about that another time). As we discussed in other posts, as I understand current technology, it lacks quantitative much less normalized ways of measuring precisely what’s being accomplished in the brain, how much is being accomplished, and precisely where that accomplishment is happening. Peoples’ brain physiology differs depending on genetics, the experiences they’ve had while growing up, and numerous other factors. Each brain is wired differently therefore. So a locus of activity in region A of person 1’s brain likely means something totally different than the same activity in the same region for person 2. Yet this article doesn’t account for these differences. It seems to treat brains rather generically, when it claims that people in chronically bad moods have more right-brain activity than left. After all, many people   normally   rely more on the right side of their brains for higher cognitive functions (particularly those involving analysis and decision-making). So who’s to say whether elevated activity in that area is due to a bad mood or healthy brain operations? To get around this problem, they might have included the less disputable blood pressure, heart rate, and galvanic skin response readings of the test subjects, to bolster their arguments for the stress-reducing effects of mindfulness meditation. But perhaps someone already did that in another article.
4. How practical would it be for westerners to make the seemingly-drastic life style changes required to benefit significantly from meditation therapy? Again, to the article’s credit, it does say that the those who seem to benefit most, have to achieve a meditative skill comparable to concert violinists or Olympic divers. Very few people at large would ever be willing to work so hard and so long.  In short, medication therapy probably will not work well unless you make a career out of it.

Well, as you can tell, I’m not overly impressed with this article. While I see the possibility of using mindfulness meditation to get short-term relief from thwarted love desires, I’m not convinced that it could totally eliminate such a basic need in the Maslownian sense. Meditation therapy may treat the symptoms perhaps, but not the root cause of the distress, which is a need for true love.  The cause of the loneliness then is simply that the suffering person lacks this true love.  The cure is (simply or not), that he obtains true love.  That’s all.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

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• Can Mindfulness Meditation Therapy Cure Love Lust?
• Celibacy Turns Priests Into Dangerous Lustful Predators
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• Love Needs Tid Bits
• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs

References

• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs   definition on Wikipedia

Six years ago, a good friend of mine, who had gone for decades without any loving girlfriends, sought relief from his chronic loneliness and pent up   love lust.  Since at that time, he felt that he would probably   never   meet a soul mate, he hunted for ways to rid himself of this   thirst for love   without actually   obtaining   love. So he toyed with    mindfulness meditation therapy   in an attempt to quell his lustful yearnings for love, that being without love usually triggers.   We debated the question whether mindful meditation therapy can indeed cure love lust, and I voiced how I view the issue in the letter included below.

Dear [Mentat],

Your belief that mindfulness meditation therapy   can   cure love lust and thus, eliminate a person’s love needs is a bit optimistic.   While you may find temporary relief from the loneliness of life without a partner,   this   approach is tantamount to   repressing   your love desires.  As you know, repression of desires is rarely a good thing since it rarely ever completely removes a lust from us.  So by putting this belief into practice, you risk spending the rest of your life unfulfilled.

No matter how hard you meditate, your love lust will probably remain due to your human genetics and socialization.  We’ve evolved, and are socialized to love.  So with such strong biological and societal forces to fight, mindful meditation therapy will likely not win out over them.  So it likely will not permanently rid you of your love longings. Your best bet therefore, would be to focus on actually   finding   a girlfriend, rather than trying to convince yourself that you don’t really need a girlfriend.

Now I don’t read about mindfulness meditation therapy regularly. So I admit that I may be lacking much knowledge that the article you provided assumes a reader has, that supports your position against love lust. However, from [my] layman’s perspective, there are problems with this article’s underlying premises. It relies on the existence of a   set point   for mood that remains essentially constant throughout life. It substantiates this by comparing the moods of people who win the lottery and those paralyzed by accidents, immediately before such a   life-altering event   and one year afterwards. I grew immediately skeptical when I read it however, because the supporting circumstances seem unrealistically contrived and impractical for the following reasons:

1. How would you know to study a particular person   before   such an event befell them, unless you had foreknowledge of its occurrence?
2. Since such   life-changing events are quite rare, you’d have to study quite a few people for quite a long time just to find a few who experience such qualifying trauma — who would meet all the pre and post-event conditions of the study. This seems like it would be prohibitively costly because most people never encounter life-altering events of this magnitude. So that would mean that you’d be conducting costly testing on people who’d never become qualified – impractical.
3. Assuming you had the money, you could study   everyone,   or at least, several million people, collecting data on their mood levels prior to these random life-changing events. This would mean giving all of them magnetic resonance imaging  scans periodically, as you’d never know when a life-altering event would happen. And they wouldn’t be a useful candidate without closely preceding mood measurements to the event.
4. It wouldn’t be as meaningful for example, to know someone’s mood levels five years prior to an accident as it would three or six months beforehand, because in that time the normal wear and tear of life can (and often does) drastically change a person’s average mood. They might have been happy five years before, but six months ahead, been sad due to job loss, death in the family, or other cumulative losses. If we thought someone was chronically happy prior to an accident, but was actually a chronically sad person, this would seem to impact the quality of whatever conclusions we might draw, once they recovered from the life-altering event. Again, highly impractical.
5. But let’s say you managed all that, and had an efficient means to collect pre life-changing event data for enough people as often as you needed to collect it. It nonetheless would appear to be error-prone because the data themselves would be so vast. This would make them more ambiguous and thus difficult to interpret.

But let’s ignore these difficulties in squarely establishing this   set point   as a valid phenomenon, and accept as a given that the moods of said people one year later are roughly the same as they were before good or bad fortunes befell them.

Though the article you cite only haphazardly establishes the mood set point in people on a large scale, I can buy it nonetheless for   most   life-altering events. After all, its contention merely adds more weight to the notion that many philosophers have suspected for centuries; that seeking gratification is a vane effort, as humans don’t stay satisfied for very long. Gratify one desire, and another takes its place. The implication: We’re no better off   after   gratification than   before. While this may be true of   many   of our desires, it is certainly   not   true for them all. Some desires, like the love lust, offer permanent benefit in exchange for keeping them gratified.

It’s quite a stretch, as indicated, to think that one’s mood a year after finding true love would be identical to that before he found it, especially given the myriad studies that show clearly greater health and longevity among people with lovers as compared to loners. People in happy, healthy unions say they reap continual benefits of being in love   long after   the first year, and their average moods would seem to improve markedly throughout the life of the union.

So you’d have to do   a lot   of eloquent empirical arguing to convince me that the benefits to the mood of finding true love would disappear entirely within the first year. This article invites us believe that the mood set point over all is generally not influenced by a life-altering event after a year since the event has [occurred]. However, to its credit, it does not specifically make this claim about the sad moods that result from love deprivation. It would have been nice to read the author’s thoughts on how meditation would specifically impact melancholy, born of lacking love.

Thus, I do not believe that that mindfulness meditation therapy would permanently cure one’s love lust completely or for very long.

Tom Hesley

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